Jess Fuller
Bertha, May 5 – Jun 11, 2017

CANADA is pleased to present Bertha, a solo exhibition by Jess Fuller. In her newest body of work, she continues her investigation into painted and sewn canvas forms, with arrangements that have grown in complexity and emotional resonance. Shapes pass over and under fields of color, becoming entangled and enmeshed, creating movement through line, volume and draping.

Fuller builds chance into her methods, yielding results full of accident and surprise. Beginning with a roll of raw cotton duck, she sews biomorphic forms that may resemble tubes or body parts. They have the provisional quality of prototypes and in her latest experiments, she steps further into figuration: adding potentially wearable gloves, pants, and hats to her vocabulary. Each piece gets washed, crumpled, and smushed until it becomes something lived-in and weird, wrinkled and untamed. Paint is then added in saturated hues, either brushed-on or sprayed, to undercut or reinforce her sewn patterns. She lives with these forms in the studio for awhile, and then working flat on the floor, places one in relationship to another, forming complete thoughts from fragments.

Fuller’s compositions are informed by an ecumenical visual library that includes high fashion, naive yard art, snapshots of nature or sidewalk detritus, and images of bodies entwined in arrangements erotic or comical. Fuller seems to be a connoisseur of oblique beauty; she collects images from the world that appeal to her idiosyncratic sense of humor and irony, and organizes them in the form of a catalog or working codex. In this way, her intuitive act of what’s worth noticing becomes reconfigured as both the subject and inspiration for the abstract paintings.

Jess Fuller was born in 1972 in Portland, Maine. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Fuller received a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from University of Iowa. Solo exhibitions include Fairy Smoke, Herald St, London (2015); Planet Without a Body, Martos Gallery, New York (2015); Jellie, Martos Gallery, New York (2012); and Washed up and bleached out, Galleri Tom Christofferson, Copenhagen (2011). Recent group exhibitions include Re-Planetizer, Regina Rex, New York (2016); Fort Greene, Venus Over LA, Los Angeles (2016); 8 Femmes, Office Baroque, Brussels (2016); World Made By Hand, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York (2016); and Call and Response, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York (2015).

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